If your New Year’s Resolution is learning how to make coffee from a world barista champion, you’re in luck. A new video series from Gwilym Davies and European Coffee Trip offers just that opportunity. Davies is the 2009 World Barista Champion and co-founder of London’s Prufrock Coffee. These days Davies is running a barista training center outside of Prague, which doubles as a film studio for this series of instructional videos. Over the course of the series, Gwilym breaks down the fundamentals of espresso preparation, including dosing, tamping, and equipment maintenance. The series is being released in installments, so be sure to sign up for notifications for when each video is released. With more and more resources like this becoming available for baristas worldwide, we can only expect 2015 to be the best year for specialty coffee yet.
Prague
Cafe Review: Můjšálekkávy in Prague
If there’s a city that actually lives up to American fairytale stereotypes about Europe, it is Prague. Walking the streets of Prague is practically an architecture history class: Gothic, Baroque, Cubist, Art Deco, and Art Nouveau all blend to make one gorgeous, cosmopolitan city. It’s not surprising that the region of the Czech Republic that Prague is in, Bohemia, lends its name to artsy neighborhoods and their denizens around the world. And nowhere is the grandeur of the Old World more visible than in one of many historic Prague cafes. …